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Dipper Dan needs to model the fluid dynamics of his pipes as "anti-matter", "cursed-earth", and God-knows-what is extracted from the reservoir under the Seat of the King's Throne.

Because We know 386 hardware as used in the past will never be able to meet the demands of problems in the year 2005, or could they? This is a job for Sun Microsystems and its competitively over-priced solutions; to harness efficient supply-chains, innovate value-added paradigms, transform distributed partnerships, disintermediate mission-critical methodologies, facilitate distributed convergence, and no-less facilitate visionary channels of helping Dipper Dan to visualize the movement of feces! Surelym this must be no less than a $10,000 solution, am I wrong?

In other news, (affordable) commodity hardware, The Weather Channel-sponsored DRI Radeon graphics drivers, and intelligible internetworking of those hosts using the API developed into the Chromium Project all can be used to stuff any marketing guru.

If you read the description of the prize, it seems like it was created by Phil Shapiro, the submitter of the story.

So can I create my own Nebula Peas prize and give it to some random free software project, like Hebcal or something, and get it posted on the front page of Slashdot?

(No offense against Hebcal; I just picked the first nonfamous project that I saw browsing SourceForge.)

Crystal Space

It's highly configurable and easy to code for. There are multiple included implementations of apps using the engine that come with it so you can keep the wheel reinvention to a minimum.

Also it supports multiple formats to be imported such as 3DS and the like.

MTW

This kind of thing is not new ANts P2P is a decentralized, encrypted anonymous protocol that works in the same way as BitTorrent. From the page "ANts P2P realizes a third generation P2P net. It protects your privacy while you are connected and makes you not trackable, hiding your identity (ip) and crypting everything you are sending/receiving from others." Why not give that a try?

SpamBayes plugin for Outlook works quite nicely - http://spambayes.sf.net/

With ADODB for PHP (and perl http://adodb.sf.net/, you can call CacheGetAll, CacheExecute, etc... The query resultset is saved to a temporary file. This avoids having to create the cache within the same function you would normally call without having to write extra code.

[first useful post?]

However, it's pretty damned good for the times where you want a machine to parse your config files and present them in a nice GUI format.

I think there's an even better solution than either straight XML or custom config schemas: a compromise that uses the best of both worlds..

As per the Elektra (http://elektra.sf.net/ project concept, store all configuration values in plain text key-value fashion but use the filesystem as the database. (Think of the /proc and /sys virtual filesystems) However, in addition to this, store metadata about the config hierarchy in a standardized XML schema. This way, you can quickly and easily read/edit by hand, software doesn't have to spend time parsing XML on load, the security is more granular, and yet GUI tools can parse the config in a standard fashion, gaining all the benefits of XML driven configuration.

This would cut down many licenses and make Windows thin client networking a breeze. I guess there are numerous systems that can do all this, but either they are complicated to setup, or have extra stuff that is not wanted (i.e. an entire operating system and desktop apps). A simple MSTSC bootdisk would be ideal.

Another PVR.

http://fftv.sf.net/

rsync doesn't scale to huge numbers of files. It also doesn't work so well when all of those are changing at once. Finally, the protocol and algorithms may work for imaging an entire disk as if it was a file, but the program doesn't -- it can ONLY copy device nodes as device nodes, and will NEVER read a block device as a normal file. There have been patches to fix this, which have been rejected.

We use a scheme which actually seems better for systems which are always on: DRBD for Linux. Basically, every block written to a device on the master is automagically duplicated to all the slaves. If the master goes down, you promote one of the slaves to master, mount the partition, and start services. If you have the heartbeat package, this can be done automatically, complete with an ip takeover.

We aren't using it for high availability, actually. We just use it to duplicate a BackupPC partition out to someone's house, over openvpn. It's much nicer than rsync -- rsync was filling up a couple of gigs of RAM before it sent a single file, and in every instance, it was still eating up more swap when we killed it out of frustration.

The high availability design does help, though. If the entire office gets nuked, we can physically carry the backup box in, turn it on, make it master, and use BackupPC's native restore feature. Sometime soon we're going to make our PHB cream his jeans by demonstrating a full, bare-metal restore.

Regardless what Apple does, we will see Apple users praising features that other operationg systems
had implemented for a long time. The Steve Jobs effect, marketing, a product designer + apple community, and a crappy music player without a colour display will be cool....

It's all about rationalising decision, and what silly arguments you will find:
- Mac OS X was a Unix and based on open source technology
- Mac OS X had good usability
- Power PC processors are better
- Having a restricted set of devices you can use with Macs is great and we like to pay more for the same technology.
- outer appearance of hardware matters
- Intel user are too common people

Well, I would not object Softpear but Apple Mac OS X, you know, I just do not like the community. I do not want to belong to the exclusive club.

No the Airport Extreme wireless is based on the now infamous 'broadcom ' wireless chipset.Most Linux users on the PPC platform have given up any hope of getting this to work, ever! On the x86 platform, broadcom cards use the excellent ndiswrapper http://ndiswrapper.sf.net/ project.

And now remembering to add relevance to this post, my point: I am waiting patiently and naively for FreeCNC http://freecnc.sf.net/ to have stable, fully functional multiplayer for Red Alert.

This means that, in general, you will have a tough time getting decent video performance out of your Mac running Linux..

I've found the opposite. I have a dual G4 tower at my disposal running Linux, and recently gave a 3D class on 10 eMacs running Linux. I chose Linux over OSX because the 3D performance was some 10-15% in frame rate alone across similar applications (Blender, Quake3). Furthermore this was using the DRI http://dri.sf.net/ instead of the proprietary drivers (which are not available for Linux PPC). Of course without the proprietary drivers you will miss out on GPU specific features like support for pixel and vertex shaders. Given that Linus develops for Linux on a PPC, I look forward to a bright future for Linux on the platform.

Airport however doesn't work - for the rest however it was a 15 minute, seamless install, and especially in the eMacs performance was overall much better.

http://ubuntulinux.org/

Zebra was sold [...] So, here you have three projects [...] where the Open sourcecode was NOT forked or picked up by anyone.

Sometimes the code for an open source project pretty much just disappears. I'd say that makes the open version much worse off than the closed version.

http://dvarchive.sf.net/ or http://www.sf.net/projects/dvarchive/

It was GPL licensed, but the original author changed the license terms and managed to get sourceforge to delete everything that had once been available from the SF page. For a year or more he had claimed that he had lost the sources and was going to upload when the new version worked. Obviously that didn't happen.

I think this happened because the project's primary user base was not open source fans, so very few copies of the source were ever archived elsewhere. Apparently, open source developers were never interested enough to create a fork or even keep a copy of the source while the source was available.

Now the source simply is not available for the current version (3.x), nor even the last versions which were ostensibly GPL'd (2.1 or 3.0). (The license for the current version is not GPL.)

It has happened with other projects, and will undoubtedly continue to happen. It won't happen any time soon with Linux kernels or emacs, but when something isn't incredibly popular, it can and does happen.

My lesson leared from this, is to keep a copy of the source for anything and everything in which I am even a little bit interested. Still get burned sometimes though.

sdb

Sometimes the code for an open source project pretty much just disappears. I'd say that makes the open version much worse off than the closed version.

http://dvarchive.sf.net/ or http://www.sf.net/projects/dvarchive/

It was GPL licensed, but the original author changed the license terms and managed to get sourceforge to delete everything that had once been available from the SF page. For a year or more he had claimed that he had lost the sources and was going to upload when the new version worked. Obviously that didn't happen.

I think this happened because the project's primary user base was not open source fans, so very few copies of the source were ever archived elsewhere. Apparently, open source developers were never interested enough to create a fork or even keep a copy of the source while the source was available.

Now the source simply is not available for the current version (3.x), nor even the last versions which were ostensibly GPL'd (2.1 or 3.0). (The license for the current version is not GPL.)

It has happened with other projects, and will undoubtedly continue to happen. It won't happen any time soon with Linux kernels or emacs, but when something isn't incredibly popular, it can and does happen.

My lesson leared from this, is to keep a copy of the source for anything and everything in which I am even a little bit interested. Still get burned sometimes though.

sdb

Unfortunately, WOWEXEC for 16-bit applications no longer exists -- there is no way to run 16-bit applications in 64-bit Windows. The biggest issue with this (aside from the fact that programs like DOSBox are still too slow and incompatible with many late DOS applications) is that many fully 32-bit Windows programs used 16-bit installers. No good.

Ltris has this feature(?) too. It's called "Expert Mode" there. I haven't compared them to see which is more evil (how's that for a fun activity?)

out of interest, what's wrong with std::string?

out of interest, what's wrong with std::string?

But searching sucks, and I depend on Evolution to do virtual folders. I'd love it even more if my email server was actually a true RDBMS where I could have, besides the traditional IMAP interface, a D (Tutorial D or D4 or something the like) language interface where I could query at will, and save my queries as views that would show up in IMAP as (virtual) folders.

BTW, even non-relational ISO SQL would be so much better than what we have now.

...and nobody bloody cares or remembers.

SwingWT is a FREE implementation of the Swing APIs on top of SWT so you get all the juicy nativeness of SWT and all of the nice APIness of Swing.

Yup. It's a great package. :-) I never liked using Powerpoint (or OO.o Impress), especially when I required a lot of math. I did presentations in Latex before (don't remember what I used, slitex? foiltex?), but the beamer package is what convinced me to never touch ppt again. Doing all these overlays in latex is of course a bit of a pain (you don't want to see the tex source ;)), but at least I get a nice PDF with (almost) all the benefits of a regular powerpoint-like presentation.

It's now already included as a standard package in tetex-3.0.

I use many java desktop apps in my day to day tasks on my linux desktop. There is no better way to connect to multiple databases than Squirrel , No better way to code in Java than NetBeans and no better editor than JEdit

I think Java 5 already has great desktop features like shared class data, and 2D acceleration for 2D acelerated hardware (which I don't have yet!).

so we can backup everything on our tapes... which you can't really do with 100+ desktops...

Actually, you can, with BackupPC. Okay, the program is actually designed to backup to disk rather than to tape, but you can then run tape-backups of the spool area. You'll wind up storing a lot more data in less space because BackupPC hardlinks identical files.

LTSP ties you to Linux while PXES http://pxes.sf.net/ gives you the freedom to choose any operating system. PXES doesn't use NFS (Network File System) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nfs, strongly associated with Unix/Linux and LAN. So you can build up on PXES thin clients on 100% Microsoft environement over LAN, WAN and VPN links.

what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.

what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.

check out http://asteriskathome.sf.net/ they have a downloadable iso image which will build an asterisk system on Centos linux, and it is compatible with modems you can get for about $8 USD each on ebay.

Try Widelands.

gnocatan plays a decent game if you're looking for a Settlers Experience.

It implements a few of the expansions too, all of them maybe?

Freecraft only had to change the name. The project itself is alive and well at http://wargus.sf.net/

I saw this story and was going to look around at your site and suggest Xcomic--but I see you're already using it! I'm glad some people are actually using it (I'm a co-developer along with Helgi and Mike H), and in a production enviroment at that. If anyone's wondering WTF I'm talking about, http://xcomic.sf.net/. You could always try purchasing ads on Megatokyo or such, that should get you a fair amount of hits as those people click the advertisements like crazy and you're a webcomic, and they're reading webcomics, so...

1. $ emerge -pv xine-lib
   
   These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
   Calculating dependencies ...done!
   
   [ebuild R ] media-libs/xine-lib-1.0-r1 +X -aac +aalib +alsa (-altivec) +arts +cle266 -debug +directfb +dvd +dxr3 +esd +fbcon -ffmpeg +flac -gnome -i8x0 -ipv6 -libcaca +mng +nls +nvidia +opengl +oss +png +samba +sdl -speex -theora +v4l +vidix +vorbis +win32codecs -xinerama +xv -xvmc 0 kB

I'd go with Ultima VII as the genre-defining RPG.

I whole-heartedly agree. I was replaying this game just last night using Exult. If you've never played it before and are an RPG fan I'd highly recommend you track down a copy (you'll probally have an easier time finding the "Ultima Collection" - Ultima 0-8) on ebay.

Though the Baldur's Gate series was also really good to play, but there is much it could of learnt from Ultima VII.

...try this.

"Could you at least of provided a simple Cocoa GUI for your program? Terminal app programs are not very popular with Mac people, you know."

that's the response I got when macupdate.com had automatically picked up one of my sf.net projects. I made an OSX installer package for my binaries and received many complaints about it in the "discuss this software" forum of macupdate...

bastards.

its a little ironic that he chose ReWire as an example of a proprietary plugin format as an case of "good stuff from the proprietary world". ironic because

1. its not a plugin format - its an architecture that requires significant re-engineering of every application that wants to use it
2. because the open source world has already learnt from ReWire and gone one better: JACK which is free of silly license restrictions, is free of silly limitations and is in every way more powerful. It runs on Linux and OS X, and is the de facto standard for inter-application audio routing on both platforms.

Kudos to the Local team, this is a big improvement.

• XBox Media Center, already one of the most popular SF.net projects, will be by far the sweetest media suite for any platform.
• Someone may port the Blackdown Java VM to the Xbox, allowing for any presently developed Java program to be ran on the exotic Xbox.
• The OpenXDK may be just as functional as its official counterpart, allowing for LEGAL xbox homebrew development.
• Add about a few dozen more fun homebrew games to the current selection.

Except of course for sf.net, which I've always thought is a damn cool domain name.

stop smoking crack. the intel 2200 and 2915 centrino wireless chipsets have excellent 100% open source linux drivers provided by intel here.

I've been using Ubuntu/x86_64 with the Kubuntu KDE distribution for the past four weeks. It's nice to have a decent installer and a system that works almost out of the box (past configuring the system for small personal preferences).
As much as I like this, there are other things that make it difficult for me to use it:

1. Wacom is not supported out of the box, and the Wacom driver module packages are incomplete (the build rules don't copy anything but wacom.ko). It'd be great to be able to install Ubuntu or Kubuntu and have the Wacom tablet work as advertised on the Linux-Wacom Driver Project page.

2. I got errors booting Grub with / and /boot on a raid1 device. On every bootup. Perhaps Ubuntu could support grub+raid1+root+boot in the future; see here for details. I was unsuccessful at getting LILO to boot, too. Maybe it's a hardware thing [1].

3. On Ubuntu/x86-64 win32 video codecs run only under a chroot'd 32-bit environment. Ubuntu could make this task easier/more seamless (for example, I want to see videos with Kaffeine or Xine, but AIUI they have to be run in a chroot environment.. that's not very seamless..)

4. It'd be great to have the installer automatically install the commercial NVidia drivers. They're currently an optional package.

5. Also great would be the inclusion of Jeff Garzik's SATA thermal sensor patches for libATA, available here.
With this patch, hddtemp works on SATA drives.

6. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have installation-time setup of the "sensors" package (i.e., run sensors-detect and install the modules as needed automatically).

7. Missing packages. Kubuntu was missing (last I checked a few days ago) the Python bindings for KDE. For that matter, there are packages that don't exist for x86_64 systems, like Psyco, Flash and the Adobe Reader.

I've since switched to Alioth's Debian/x86_64, but would happily switch back when Kubuntu-x86_64 matures, as Alioth does not seem to have 64-bit KDE 3.4.0 packages (could be wrong though).

references:

1. My motherboard is a MSI NEO K8T FIS2R with an Athlon64/3200+.

- Roey

Actually, SUSE can still package Mplayer or xine. All they have to do is enter an agreement with MPEGLA and Thomson and ViaLicensing and, ... and pay royalties for every copy of SuSE Linux they sell. Maybe the downloadable SuSE would then come without multimedia support

Well, maybe they would have to limit the formats played back, otherwise that game's gonna get real expensive soon.

Actually, I don't think that open source media players are really in danger. They will probably have to stop shipping packages and do source-only. look at the DREAM project as an example, http://drm.sf.net/ . Patent royalties usually become applicable when you ship executables.

A example of a small, but useful open source project that started as an internal project:

JavaConfig. It allows easy and type-safe access to configuration properties, for Java based applications.

My previous employer, Chess in Haarlem, the Netherlands, agreed to make it Open Source (under a BSD license) after me and a few other colleagues had been working on it for a while. Proves that it's a cool company ;)

our favorite windows based yet open source HTPC app, http://mediaportal.sf.net/

http://freenet.sf.net

nobody would be able to make a living writing software

I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.

I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.

nobody would be able to make a living writing software

I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.

I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.